In the telecommunications industry, sales agents are tasked with quickly providing accurate cost estimates for services offered by other telecommunications provider. As technology has evolved, telecommunications services have grown from basic telephone services, to advanced telephone services (including digital telephone services, caller ID, call waiting, voicemail, etc.), Internet connectivity, high-speed Internet connectivity, dedicated network connections between a company's various locations, voice over IP (VoIP) services, video streaming and video conferencing services, among others. To provide the services, such providers must maintain and deploy a vast amount of infrastructure. Such infrastructure includes switches, routers, repeaters, servers, firewalls, and physical connections between components that make up a network. For example, to provide Internet service to an office in a building, the office may need to be connected to a building router that is in turn connected to a network cable running under a street that's in front of the building. The cable running under the street may in turn be connected to the greater Internet at a switch located near the city center.
Accurately estimating the cost for providing services is often challenging because in many instances, a given telecommunications provider must use other provider's infrastructures. Using the above office example, the telecommunications provider may own the infrastructure that connects to the greater Internet, but may not own the infrastructure in the building or the cable running under the street. The costs associated with using other telecommunications providers' infrastructure are referred to as off-network or “off-net” costs, while the costs associated with using the provider's infrastructure are referred to as on-network or “on-net” costs. Connecting the office to the Internet therefore may include off-network costs for using the building's infrastructure and the local infrastructure running under the street, in addition to the on-net costs associated with connecting to the provider's infrastructure.
In order to accurately estimate the cost of services, a sales agent must account for both the off-net costs and the on-net costs. A telecommunication company therefore acts as both a provider of services and an intermediary between the customers and the off-net providers.
Accurately estimating the costs associated with off-net services is important, because incorrect estimates can lead to costly billing disputes with customers. In practice, the sheer volume of invoices often makes it difficult to recognize billing discrepancies. The inevitable discrepancies often lead to lengthy billing disputes that result in the non-payment of balances or partial payments. Thus, it is advantageous to recognize any discrepancies between the customer's bill and the estimated cost as early as possible, so that the dispute process can be taken care of quickly. Therefore, there is a need to define logic for end-to-end correlation of a quoted cost and accurately identify planned off-net access costs to estimate the cost of services sold to provide a more accurate estimate and audit processes to improve gross margins, optimize billing dispute resolution for all parties, and maximize capacity utilization. At present, no industry standard tools exist to derive off-net planned cost before billing occurs.
It is with these issues and problems in mind that various aspects of the present disclosure were developed.